Agree:

An entrepreneurial culture thrives when it’s easy to try lots of new ideas. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to give everyone a cushion to try new things. There is something wrong with our system when I can make billions of dollars in 10 years while millions of students can’t afford to pay off their loans, let alone start a business.

Yanis Varoufakis
Former finance minister of Greece, is Professor of Economics at the University of Athens

Either we are going to have a basic income that regulates this new society of ours, or we are going to have very substantial social conflicts that get far worse with xenophobia and refugees and migration and so forth.

It comes from the right wing originally. Milton Friedman proposed it for example. From his point of view it was part of an effort to undermine welfare state measures. But it doesn’t have to have a reactionary component. It can be interpreted as something progressive. That people have rights. In fact if you read the universal declaration of human rights, 1948, take a look at article 45. It says peo...See More

Sam Altman
President of Y Combinator. Investor at Reddit, Stripe, Change.org, Pinterest and many others

I think it’s good to start studying [basic income] early. I’m fairly confident that at some point in the future, as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs and massive new wealth gets created, we’re going to see some version of this at a national scale.

We usually focus on employment and production. Yet, much of the world’s population has no realistic prospects of employment, and we already produce more than what is sustainable. Basic income, however, separates survival from employment or production.

Enrique Dans
Professor of Innovation at IE Business School and blogger

Utopia? Not at all. We need to advance the discussion and make politicians understand that it is the only way forward. And if we don’t move forward, we’re going to end up in a place none of us is going to like.

We will need to redistribute income and wealth. Such redistribution could take the form of a basic income for every adult, together with funding of education and training at any stage in a person’s life

We're about to lose some of the most basic programs we had [because of technology], like Medicare, potentially. I don’t think there's any proof that it's any more politically feasible to hold on to what we have than to build on a big new idea.

Jean-Yves Duclos
Minister of Families, Children and Social Development in Canada

I think it’s the principles behind the idea [of a guaranteed income] that matter. These principles are greater simplicity for the government, greater transparency on the part of families and greater equity for everyone

David Rolf
Vice President of SEIU and President of SEIU Local 775 in Seattle

I happen to think universal basic income and a high minimum wage work well in combination to produce tighter labor markets, more consumer spending power, and if McDonald's want to lure you out of your rock band or off your couch to go and cook french fries, they ought to have to pay a premium for that.

We have a small technological aristocracy and a middle class struggling to catch up with the demands of a more efficient economy. Basic income can bring a baseline and offer freedom to those trapped by our new economy.

Disagree:

I do not believe in unconditional basic income because this just encourages people to be trapped in low skilled jobs without a meaningful path to climb up to do better work.
So rather than to pay people to “do nothing” I would rather see a new “New deal” where we pay you to study because I think that today we know how to educate people at scale and the society is pretty good at finding meaningf...See More

Economically, states already guarantee a basic salary under certain conditions, for example in cases of unemployment or extreme poverty. With universal basic income, this assistance would no longer be temporary or linked to a certain condition, and I don’t think it would be sustainable. Moreover, I don’t like the idea of a world where work is no longer a form of self-realisation for citizens. I im...See More

Yuval Noah Harari
Israeli historian and a tenured professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Paying people not to work will only increase inequality and rancor. [...] If universal basic income is aimed to improve the objective conditions of the average person in 2050, it has a fair chance of succeeding. But if it is aimed to make people subjectively more satisfied with their lot in order to prevent social discontent, it is likely to fail.

A basic income guarantee is a neo-liberal strategy for serfdom without the work ... In addition to a Job Guarantee we also demand a Services Guarantee. It is no good having a bare minimum income if the dentists and doctors and shops in your town are closed and the public transport system is deficient.

Tony Atkinson
Research Fellow at Oxford and Professor at the London School of Economics

David de Ugarte
Economist and co-founder of the co-op Sociedad de las Indias Electrónicas

The basic income is attractive: it’s individually empowering, it crosses ideological borders, it’s a technocrat’s dream… but it would have terrible social and moral consequences: xenophobia, inequality, and a rise in the power of Big Businesses.

The UBI short-cut to more leisure time, less poverty, and strengthened unions delivered up on a platter by a corporate-captured state that has demonstrated for 40 years it is committed to the opposite of all this is a fantasy. If we want more leisure time, we have to get productivity growing again. And to get productivity growing again, labour has to become more expensive. And the only way for lab...See More

Anke Hassel
Sociologist. Professor at the Hertie School of Governance. Director of Hans Böckler Foundation

The basic income will further divide society and prevent social mobility. Those who, due to their family background, have good prospects for interesting employment and high income will maintain their existing work ethic, engaging in school and study, and maybe taking a sabbatical or two in between. This is a good thing. However, life will become more difficult for young people from parts of societ...See More

A guaranteed annual income is not an end in itself. It should not be viewed as a replacement for a full employment policy. If the purpose is to reduce inequality and poverty, there are other solutions: bringing real changes to the tax system, getting tougher on fiscal havens, introducing inheritance taxes and of course, jobs, jobs, jobs.

I do not support sending a BIG check to everyone. It is a devaluation of the currency, as prices rise so that the BIG payment essentially becomes the entry price to the marketplace. So we will need to target the BIG to those who do not (or cannot) work. Yes there’s some stigma. But, first we implement Employer of Last Resort so that anyone who is ready and willing to work has a job in the Job Gua...See More

UBI creates a new difference between those people who work and earn a living and those people who, for wathever reason, don't work but still earn a living. This is going to create two classes of people (...) and for me the big issue is why do that?. I like the idea of community building by not having people that are extremely wealthy or extremely poor, but I don't like this way of doing it, becau...See More

There is almost a ‘neoclassical market equilibrating assumption’ behind most BIG analysis that says: “as long as people have cash, the market will magically provide the goods for them, allow them to acquire assets, provide them with the freedom to do what they please, etc. etc.” If the market hasn’t solved these problems now, why would it do so just because people get cash? All structures that ma...See More

Make no mistake: modern welfare states leave plenty to be desired. Disability benefits are for many people an unsatisfactory version of a basic income, providing those who will no longer work with enough to get by. But rather than upend society with radical welfare reforms premised on a job-killing technological revolution that has not yet happened, governments should make better use of the tools ...See More

Dany Lang
Economist. Associate Professor at University of Paris 13. Researcher at CNRS.

I don't believe in the relevance of the universal basic income proposal. [...] Personally, it is a proposal that embodies the idea of the end of work, i.e. it will not be possible any more to ensure full employment for all. However, in a society where there are many social needs not yet fulfilled, because the market mechanisms do not manage to satisfy them and because the Government, both central ...See More

By applying to a fundamentally unequal situation a perfectly equal treatment does not create more equality: it reinforces instead existing inequalities. Far from being fair, it is on the opposite the negation of justice. Regarding social efficiency, we can easily demonstrate that the project has none

The popularity of universal basic income is in reality a triumph of the neoliberal ideology, an ideology that refuses, in any social policy, to put inequalities at the center of our democracies. Basically, it is an illusory fight against poverty without really fighting against inequalities

Seth Ackerman
Doctoral candidate in History at Cornell. Editorial board of Jacobin magazine.

Reducing work-time(...) is enormously preferable, because everyone benefits equally and together. The alternative – reducing the number of workers per capita (with an UBI) – amounts to the creation of essentially arbitrary classes of idle and segmented citizens, whose existence would be virtually guaranteed to divide and embitter the working class to the benefit of reactionary pro-work politics.

UBI does not alleviate poverty and turns social necessities into products for profit. To truly address inequality we need adequate social provisioning. If we want to reduce means testing and dependency on capitalist employment, we can do so with capacity planning. Our political demands should mandate sufficient housing, healthcare, education, childcare and all basic human necessities for all. Rath...See More

The different approaches to UBI do not escape to criticism: either they don’t mention the gender issue or they more or less defend the idea of a maternal salary, with the risk of stating that the latter would be favorable to women emancipation. Hence, the risk is real – we use as a proof the analysis of a “universal” basic income measure already implemented (education parental income, targeting al...See More

Would the payment of a basic income to the whole population foster the same macroeconomic mechanism (i.e. a demand-led stimulation)? Yes if such payments anticipate additional production. But, by definition, the unconditional basic income is isolated from any anticipation and therefore from any social validation, as it is unconditional. The utility value of free work (for example the social link o...See More

Paul Ariès
Political scientist. Editor of Les Zindigné(es). Observatoire International de la gratuité

To exit the true/false debate on the universal basic income, let’s defend the free public service! (…) To defend and increase the weight of free goods is to give everybody what they need to live, in an unconditional way but with a revenue largely demonetized, diseconomized. It is therefore to exit from capitalism.

This puerile regression takes multiple forms : for example the desire of receiving without never contributing to the collective effort – the latter being typical of fetuses and infants. This proposition seems of course at first very nice for whoever remembers the principles of justice. Beyond all the criticism of the unconditional income […], its main flaw seem to us within this framework. This i...See More

MIchael Hudson
Economist. Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

The problem’s not only income, but what people have to spend it on. Paine didn’t talk about universal income, he talked about everybody should have the right to a place to live, a means of their own self-support. That’s independent from income. Once you economize and financialize it, you put in a distortion. You don’t want to give people income to buy what really should be public goods and servic...See More